Lino Tenimenti was tender, almost reverential, as he picked through neatly stacked boxes of scarlet-streaked radicchio. Some resembled finger-like tendrils. Others were tightly bunched, many-layered oblongs. Finally, he settled on one that resembled a large, rose-tinted head of lettuce, sprawling with creased, crisp leaves.

“This isn’t radicchio,” he told me, splaying its leaves. “It’s a work of art.”

And a delicious one, at that. I love radicchio in all its many varieties, but until visiting Tenimenti’s farm—where his family has grown radicchio for nearly 50 years—I had no idea how truly varied it can be. Nor how much work it takes to produce it.

Treviso, a centuries-old city in northern Italy cut through by numerous canals, is known for three things—prosecco, tiramisù and radicchio. It’s a trio that belongs together, because after enough sparkling wine and creamy, coffee-­sodden dessert, the crisp, gently bitter-fresh crunch of radicchio brings welcome balance.

Tenimenti explained that how bitter, how beautiful, how crisp, even how a radicchio is shaped all depend as much on location as variety. Radicchio is a chameleon, he explained, adapting well to most any weather and climate by changing its shape, color and taste. So the plants grown at his farm can be wildly different from those produced even at a neighboring farm.

And getting it from farm to table is an ordeal. The plants spend several months in the earth, where they look entirely inedible—overgrown, wilted weeds seemingly better suited for a witch’s brew. Pulled from the dirt, they are trimmed and floated in massive tanks of circulating spring water for another month, a process that crisps and plumps them.

Only at this stage do they begin to resemble the vegetable we know. Prepping them for the produce aisle is a three-person job. The first further trims away the outer leaves, finally revealing the beautiful interior. A second deftly slices off the roots, then dunks the head in a tub of water to clean it. A final person again trims away exterior leaves.

Italians eat the resulting heads—now less than a quarter of the starting size—numerous ways, including mixed with ricotta and stuffed into pasta shells, as well as paired with sweet scamorza cheese and heaped onto crispy crostini. But my favorite involved roughly chopping the radicchio and stirring it into another northern Italian specialty: risotto.

As I ate my way around the city, I noticed that successfully marrying crunchy radicchio with creamy rice is all a matter of timing. By far, the best version I ate was at Trattoria Toni del Spin—a restaurant that dates to the 1800s—where chef Guido Severin is careful to add only some of the radicchio at the start of the cooking.

It mattered. That early addition cooked down with the rice and onion, its bitterness mellowing and its crunch giving way to a sweet creaminess that complemented the starchy rice. But the bulk of the radicchio was added only during the final minutes of cooking, allowing it to keep its assertive flavor and crunch, becoming the perfect counterpoint to the risotto.

Other versions I ate built on this, adding pork—sometimes as sausage, sometimes as pancetta or guanciale—the richness of which balanced the vegetable. Also copious red wine, staining the dish until the entire thing looked rather radicchio-like.

Indeed, a work of art.